The New York Times compared Sheldon Novick's first volume of Henry James's life, The Young Master, to "a movie of James's life, as it unfolds, moment to moment, lending the book a powerful immediacy." In this second volume, Novick completes his superb account of one of the world's most gifted and least understood authors, and reanimates a vanished world of aristocrats and commoners. The book features vivid portraits of such peers as Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, and Robert Louis Stevenson; his close and loving siblings Alice and William; and the many compelling young men, among them Hugh Walpole and Howard Sturgis, with whom James exchanges professions of love and among whom he thrives.

"This second and final volume (after Henry James: The Young Master) of [Sheldon] Novick's epic James biography covers the period beginning immediately following the 1881 publication of The Portrait of a Lady and ends with James's extended final illness and death in 1916. In between, James's personal and literary life is exhaustively chronicled in a meticulous fashion. Novick's goal is to show James as an active, passionate, engaged man of his time, rather than as the repressed, passive man of literary myth, and he achieves this goal resoundingly by allowing the reader access to James on almost a daily level, often through his frequent letters to friends and family.... Any reader interested in the master's political development or prolific working methods would do well to turn to this definitive work."—Publishers Weekly (starred review)